1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to method of printing a document.
2. Background to the Invention
There is often a need to print documents away from a user's home environment. For example, travelling sales persons at customer sites, or visitors to competitor/collaborator's locations, often need to print documents not only from the portable device they carry, but also from the file system in their home location. Printing in an environment that is considered as potentially hostile requires not only a guarantee that there is protection of the information sent from the home environment to within the foreign environment and in transit through the internet, but also that the security of the hosting foreign environment is not compromised.
For example, consider a person from company X who has important confidential documents stored in his home storage system. He is visiting a competing company, Y, with a view to establish a collaboration project. This is a preliminary investigation and consequently there is very little safeguard with respect to disclosure of information apart from a standard non-disclosure agreement from the legal department.
This person travels with his mobile device, such as a WAP phone, but nothing else as he does not expect too much progress to be made. Half way through the meeting with company Y, the person decides that he needs to retrieve some confidential information from his home system in order to be able to continue with the discussion.
It may well be that company X does not allow any confidential files to be transported out of the home system and has a configuration to disallow ports that might be used for printing. In the same way, company Y may not allow any outsider to print on their network printer, either on site or by pulling the print job from outside their own firewall.
It can be seen on the one hand, there are the needs of a visitor who wants to print in the foreign environment and, on the other hand, there are the needs of the foreign environment in which printing is to be enabled for the visitor. Their needs, collectively, could be met by what will hereafter be called a Trusted Remote Printing Service (TRPS) which the present invention seeks to provide.